An adaptive transmission scheme for cooperative communications is proposed in this paper. Communication protocols with amplify-and-forward relays based on the distributed-Alamouti space-time code (achieving spatial diversity gain) and cooperative spatial multiplexing (C-SM) (pertaining spatial multiplexing gain)are considered. Specifically, under a fix transmission rate, we use adaptively the cooperative diversity (C-DIV) and C-SM according to channel conditions. With this strategy, either C-DIV with higher order modulation or C-SM with lower order modulation can be properly selected to enhance the error rate performance. The proposed adaptive protocol is shown to provide superior performance compared to C-DIV and C-SM.